Monday, June 24, 2013

Edward Snowden and the Patriots

Pretty much every American with a strong opinion on Edward Snowden doubtless self-identifies as a
"patriot." Whether you support or condemn him depends on
which definition of "patriot" you go by: either "I support Snowden because, as a patriot, I believe in upholding the constitution, its freedom and individual rights and so forth" or "I condemn Snowden because, as a patriot,
I believe I should trust and obey the government, and if they're
violating parts of the constitution then surely, they must have good reason for it."

Our American politicos have been screeching non-stop about how Snowden betrayed his oath to uphold the constitution and the law, on the grounds that he did something they didn't want him to do. Naturally I take the opposite view: the lawbreakers are the NSA staff who spy on ordinary American citizens, and the elected officials who support such spying. These people violated their oaths to uphold the constitution, but Snowden stayed true to his.

I still cling to the hope that eventually our nation will come back to its collective senses, and future American schoolchildren will learn about Edward Snowden alongside Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, the "suffragettes" who marched to get women the vote, and all others who were condemned as criminals in their time yet exonerated as heroes by history.

But what if he's rated alongside Benedict Arnold instead? Ultimately, Snowden's status in future history books depends upon which view of "upholding the constitution" wins out: does upholding the
constitution mean protecting and preserving the individual rights it
guarantees, or does it mean you go along with
whatever the government does, so long as they say "Trust us, we're doing
this for national security?"

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About Me

Jennifer Abel is an American writer who began her career in print media three minutes before the Internet killed the industry. After starting at a small Connecticut daily she moved to the Hartford Advocate, an alt-weekly where her journalistic coups included infiltrating a Furries convention and working on a phone sex line (which fired her six hours later). Since then she’s written for, or been reprinted in, dozens of print and web outlets, including Playboy, the Guardian, Salon, AlterNet, Mashable, the Daily Dot and pretty much every website with the words "cannabis" or "legalize it" in the title. Once, when she was young and naïve and needed the money, she unwittingly edited SEO copy for a spammer. However, in light of the spambot comments she’s deleted from her own blogs since then, she figures she’s more than repaid that particular karmic debt. Jennifer is currently looking for professional, non-spam writing jobs; interested editors are enthusiastically invited to e-mail her.